By Schubert Ogden
It seems clear from Hartshorne's discussion that there is not simply one sense, but at least two senses, in which faith may be said to transcend reason. Wiki Markup
Wiki Markup |
---|
Faith transcends reason in one sense insofar as it transcends all attempts at rational justification. Even after we have weighed the evidences as best we can, the result may not be conclusive, as between one form of faith and another. And yet we need a living faith more definite than the mere general faith that somehow it is all right for us to live and try to do our best. "So it seems that each individual must carry carryonon such reasoning as \[she or\] he has opportunity and leisure to effectuate, and then 'take a chance' on the best guess \[she or\] he can make. \[Her or h\]is reasoning may seem to favor this faith over that, but inconclusively. Yet \[her or\] his life of faith can hardly be equally undecided. Or can it? And is such indecision desirable?" (_RSP_: 165 f.). |
Wiki Markup |
---|
But faith also transcends reason in the sense that "in so far as faith, or life-trust, has something particular as its object it transcends rational evidence.... Rational theology may be able to show that there is a God who cherishes all \[God's\] creatures; but no rational discipline can show that there is a God who cherishes 'me.' . . . That about God which reason cannot know is . . . the particular form that \[God's\] knowing or loving takes when a given particular creature is its object" (171). |
Actually, Hartshorne himself explicitly refers to both of these senses when, in response to the question whether rational metaphysics may not go too far by in effect denying or ignoring the mysteriousness of God, he says: "In the first place, metaphysics is reason at its problematic limits. It is mysterious enough. In the second place, reason deals with the universal and abstract; the wholly particular and concrete can only be intuited" (171).
I should probably want to make the same point by distinguishing between faith in the objective sense (fides quae creditur) as a certain existential understanding of human existence and faith in the subjective sense (fides qua creditur) as a certain existential self-understanding. In both senses, faith may be said to transcend reason: in the first sense, because no existential understanding of existence may be conclusively verifiable; in the